Alvaro Siza: In the Garden

© Juan Rodríguez

Amag Publishers and the Caja de Arquitectos Foundation have just released Siza x Siza, which focuses on six projects chosen by the architect, with black-and-white photographs by Juan Rodríguez, original drawings and sketches, and extensive interviews on the projects themselves and other themes.

Siza took a special interest in this project, working very closely with the editors.

I am very proud to be included in this book at Siza's request, with a short text, In the Garden. Other texts are by Kenneth Frampton, Eduardo Souto de Moura and Juhani Pallasmaa.

We will all be present this coming November 20th in the official presentation of the book at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. 

Boa Nova Tea House and Restaurant. Photo © Juan Rodríguez

In the Garden 

In various articles I have written over the years covering different projects by Álvaro Siza, I often focus on their relationship to the landscapes and urbanscapes of northern Portugal, coming back again and again to the image of a neglected garden, lush, unkempt and overgrown. Traveling as I do from the high, dry, flat meseta of central Spain to Porto underlies for me the particular character of the place: its verdant humidity and mild temperatures, and its abrupt topography, which disrupts any would-be orthogonal order on the part of would-be planners, contributing to the general disorderliness of urban and rural settlements. As I wrote in an article on the Serralves Museum in 1999, "The verdant hills overlooking the Douro are covered by a crazy-quilt of development, in which dense new growth jostles for place among old villas, small industries and languishing vegetable plots."

The strength of the relation of this landscape and its patterns of settlement to the work of Siza struck me most forcefully when I visited, in 2002, his restoration of and additions to the 18th century country estate of the Quinta Santo Ovidio, east of Porto:

"The fragmentary Baroque elements of the Quinta [its allée of lime trees, Baroque fountain, simple house and small formal garden] bear the same relation to the grand axes of Rome or Versailles that Siza's quirky modernism has to the canonical works of Le Corbusier or Mies. Siza ... transforms [modern architecture] from a universalizing formal language into a language of particularity and fragmentation: he passes Modernism through the historic, rumpled, genteel hillside gardens of northern Portugal."

An essential quality of this relation between the Portuguese landscape and culture and Siza's work is precisely the concept of gentility. I have always been struck by the bourgeois, slightly antique feel of many of Siza's details. When I interviewed him for the Serralves Museum, for example, he was still designing the seating for the auditorium:

"Each seat is a self-contained armchair, with its curving back sloping down and around to form the arms. 'I will make them out of maple, like this,' Siza tells me.  'With velvet backs and leather trim, here and here.  It is something I saw in the opera house in Naples.  Side by side, like armchairs.  Its very intimate. You feel more at home.  You feel decadent.' "

What makes such details seem so at home in Portugal is their cultivation of gentility, which one still encounters, for example in old restaurants and cafés, with their uniformed waiters and handsome table settings. And what could be more genteel than an unkempt garden? It is a surviving fragment of past wealth, culture and glory, now somewhat faded but respected and maintained through the generations. The gentleness in the word genteel is embodied in Siza's respect for this landscape and its past, its ancient cultural richness lingering in a disheveled, poorer present, a situation one could appreciate even before the country's current economic crisis.

Siza extends the largess of this well-mannered respect not only to the more aristocratic qualities of the landscape but also, simply, to the traces of the past and place. His is not an architecture of the bulldozer and the tabula rasa; instead, his designs seek their place amid what already is. For this reason, the Boanova Restaurant and Teahouse in Leça da Palmeira is sited not on along the flat expanse of a seaside promenade, but instead is embedded in a forbidding outcropping of rocks.

Siza's mastery of natural light and relative indifference to building materials form part of this faded aristocracy of manner. Modernism allows him to dematerialize gentility to its essence as a dignification of everyday life and its pleasures. Visiting again the Serralves Museum, I wrote,

"As you explore the Museum, you are surprised and delighted at every turn by his spare, elegant geometries and off-balance symmetries, and by the way that natural light is reflected and re-reflected from walls and horizontal planes, creating an effect of expansive, luminous spatial containment."

Writing about the Galician Museum of Contemporary in 1994, when I was much younger, I summed up all these intuitions about Siza's method in a general attack, with the help of the philosopher Theodor Adorno, on an opposing formalism of perfect geometric abstraction that I found in certain Madrid architects. These words can stand in as well, I think, for a philosophical argument in favor of Siza's design method as the superation of an excessive reliance in the modern tradition on concepts of internal logic, functionality and reason:

"In Siza's poetic approach to architecture, his regard for the site is transformed into a peculiar personal formal geometry.  Siza uses regulating lines in plan to lay out, from the point of entry, the two intersecting volumes of the design.  These regulating lines fan out from their point of origin as if from the viewing point of a perspectival construction, producing strange intersections, collisions and incongruities deep in the body of the building.  The access ramp and tilted horizontal soffit of the facade reflect these same visual lines in the vertical plane.  When seen from other points in the building, it is as if Siza had scrambled the rules of perspective and the abstract geometry it was designed to portray, returning us to a more immediate, anarchic register of perception, a mannerist retake on modernism which complements the eccentric Baroque monastery next door."

"Siza's fractured geometry reminds me of a passage in Theodor Adorno's ... Against Epistemology, in which he attacks certain aspects of the scientific spirit which have been well represented in postwar art and architecture, in the cult of formalism: 'But the more hermetically the unconscious of the mathematician seals his propositions against any inkling of involvements, the more perfectly pure forms of thought, from which memory is expunged in abstraction, come to appear as the sole "reality".  Their reification is the equivalent for the fact that they were broken from that objecthood without which the issue of "form" would not even arise.' "

Sources

Articles by David Cohn:

“Projects: Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal,” Architectural Record (New York), November 1999, pages 102 - 109.

“Weekends in the Country,” World Architecture 105, April 2002, pages 26 - 33.

“Siza in Granite,” Bauwelt 19, May 13, 1994, pages 1038 - 1045.

Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, English edition, The MIT Press, 1983, page 55.

English edition:
Juan Rodríguez and Carlos Seoane, editors
Siza by Siza
Amag Editorial, La Coruña, Spain, 2015

Spanish edition:
Siza x Siza
Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, Barcelona, 2015 

Contents 

Made For
Juan Rodríguez and Carlos Seoane 

The Craft of the Poet
Juan Rodriguez and Carlos Seoane 

Álvaro Siza: A Revised Interview
Interview with Eduardo Souto Moura, by Juan Rodriguez in Pamplona, April 24, 2015 

The Boa Nova Tea House and Restaurant. 1958-63
The Locus 

The Leça Palmeira Swimming Pool Complex. 1959-73
Material 

The Malagueira Housing Complex. 1973-77 
Politics and Architecture 

The Flittering Image of Reality
Kenneth Frampton 

The Riches of Restraint
Juhani Pallasmaa 

In the Garden
David Cohn 

Interview
Conducted by Juan Rodriguez and Carlos Seoane (Porto) 

FAUP. The Porto Architecture School. 1986-93
The Porto School 

The Galicia Museum of Contemporary Art (CGAC). Santiago de Compostela. 1988-93
Specialization 

The Santa Maria Church. Marco de Canaveses. 1990-96
Light and Architecture

Architecture as Fiction: Santa Maria de Bouro

All photos © Juan Rodríguez

The photographer Juan Rodríguez asked me to contribute a few lines about the Pousada de Santa Maria do Bouro for his large book of black-and-white photographs dedicated to the work of Eduardo Souto de Moura. Here is the text in full:  

"Architecture can sometimes become a kind of non-narrative fiction. It has no characters, no observable movement, no plot – or at least none of these things until we as actors come to live a moment of our lives upon its stage. But in the hands of an architect who is alert and exacting –who arrives at a site to listen and observe, and then designs the project by inhaling everything that must go into it and then breathing it all out again– architecture can become more than simply a practical solution to a practical problem. It can register, suggest or encapsulate essential aspects or properties of a culture, place or zeitgeist as effectively and seductively as a good novel."

"Or this at least can be argued in the case of Eduardo Souto de Moura's Pousada de Santa María do Bouro. When Souto first came to the site he found ruins: the crumbling walls, without floors or roof, of an 18^th century Cistercian monastery on the banks of the Cavado River. When he finished the work some ten years later, he left behind the same ruins, but rendered in such a way that they had become not only inhabitable, but eloquent, whispering a thousand stories to any visitor who cared to listen – stories about their stone walls, their spaces and courtyards, the tiny village and the untamed countryside around them, stories that fuse in a timeless continuum the past and present of that particular place on the riverbank."

"Guests are not simply brought back to a recreation, mimetic but ultimately false and simulated, of the monastery's past, though they do sleep in former monk's cells and dine in the refectory and under the monumental chimney of its kitchen. Souto instead has given us the ruin as he found it, converting its lost past into a suggestion, a trace, a whisper that permeates and perfumes its present condition. At the same time, his exacting, minimal intervention creates an austere, elegant, zen-like realm of ease and repose that is imbued with an epicurean sense of how best to live life in this particular place at the present moment, a moment immersed in the accumulated stories of the past, as well as our own, hurtling trajectory into the future, both infused with an awareness of mortality."

Pousada de Santa Maria do Bouro
Juan Rodríguez, Eduardo Souto Moura at Work, Amag Editorial, La Coruña, October 2014, page 199
Buy the book: Editorial Amag

Souto de Moura's Burgo Tower

Beinahe Nichts With a Twist
I've just posted this 2008 article that appeared in architektur.aktuell on the Burgo Tower in Porto by Eduardo Souto de Moura.

"While Álvaro Siza's local buildings portray him as the gentlemanly master of effects of reflected light and playful spatial distortion, Souto de Moura reaffirms himself with this tower as a reclusive perfectionist, establishing an island of absolute, calming order amid the unplanned chaos, the disordered, overgrown garden of Porto's urbanized suburbs."

Souto de Moura, Architect of the Year

Could it have been anyone else? My selection for Architect of the Year in the Ladies and Gentlemen section of the December Gentleman (Spanish edition) is Eduardo Souto de Moura, winner of this year's Pritzker Prize. (Sorry, no web version available).

"...en la última década ha encontrado su propia voz, caracterizada por rotondas formas geométricas y una contención formal que envuelve sus obras en un silencio altamente expresivo. Frente a la demanda por una austeridad más pragmática y funcional, la obra de Souto de Moura revindica valores esenciales de la arquitectura para un futuro incierto."

Runners up: Oscar Niemeyer, José María Sánchez García and
Jürgen Mayer H.

Souto, SIza, Aalto and Mies

El País published an interview yesterday with Eduardo Souto de Moura, including some interesting comments on the relation of his work to Siza's. Here are some excerpts:

"When I was studying, the school in Oporto was highly politicized. Those were the years of sociology. And we worked to change the substandard workers' housing, called islands, that were located in the yards of bourgeois houses. We wanted to change things. We worked with neighborhood associations. … Then the Revolution of the Carnations erupted [1973]. And when Nuno Portas became State Secretary of Housing, he said that he'd support anyone with a plan and an organization. We decided to improve that housingm but we needed an architect to sign the project documents. We were all students. And so we went to find the best. And the best was Siza. Afterwards, I stayed and worked with him for five years."

"Working with Álvaro is fantastic. He's an exceptional person. Back them he had become a widower and I was still single, so we ate together often. He defended Alvar Aalto. I liked Mies van der Rohe."

"I thought then that Aalto was an expressionist. But visiting his work in Finland you understand that he was very rationalist. … But I think Mies was more radical."

"It was the period of the Revolution.  The entire country had to be rebuilt, half a million housing units were needed. And we couldn't do that feeling out the place and local customs like Alvar Aalto. We first needed a technical language to overcome the pressure of Post Modernism, a practical and efficient language. We talked about this a lot. And I thought Mies could help us more than Alvar Aalto."

What do you admire in Siza?

"His figure has marked me more than his architecture: the man, his ethics and his knowledge. He gives you the working instruments. But he is extremely demanding. He's smooth and sweet, but he wants to understand everything."

You didn't want to be his disciple…?

"It wasn't possible. I couldn't get into his head. I know perfectly well the language, the technical aspects. I know his grammar. But I could never think like him. I have other ideas. He says I am a neoplasticist, like the Mies I like. I don't have to prove anything to him, and he never wants to impose anything on me. And so we get along together very well. Working together is like playing chess."

[On Siza]: "I insist: the personality is stronger than the architect. It's very important to understand the identity, the ethics that are the consequence of this kind of obsessive architecture. He has always been obstinate. When he was building the Boa Nova Teahouse, he slept on the rocks. He knew them by heart."

Like Siza in Porto Alegre, you have also let loose a little over time.

"Yes, that's what they say. I think this began when I was designing the Oporto metro. There were no recipes there. I had to learn to take the scale of the city like a doctor examining a patient.... Doing the metro, I thought it may well be that things are not quite as Cartesian as we think. And then there's the idea of experimenting. Without  experimentation, the profession is very boring. And since the world isn't black and white, one can try different things."

Anatxu Zabalbeascoa
Eduardo Souto de Moura. "Soy realista. Creo en la reparación"
El Pais Semanal
July 25, 2011
Photo from the article
Excerpts translated from Spanish by DC

Eduardo Souto de Moura

My news story and analysis on Eduardo Souto de Moura, recipient of the 2011 Pritzker Prize, Why Souto de Moura Won the Pritzker, appears today in the news section of the Architectural Record web page.

For background on Souto de Moura, here are three articles I've written on his work over the years:

Beinah Nichtes With a Twist /Almost Nothing with a Twist
Torre Burgo, Porto, Portugal
architekur.aktuell, November 2008, pages 58 - 69.
(Sorry, no web version available at present).

Different Voices
Pousada de Santa María do Bouro

Different versions of this article appeared in:
Architectural Record, November 1998, pages 120 - 123.
Bauwelt 4, January 22, 1999, pages 174 - 179.
World Architecture 73 (London), February 1999, pages 78 - 79.

The Court House Revisited
Court Houses, Matosinhos, Portugal

Published as:
Hofhäuser in Hafenmähe
Bauwelt 33, September 1, 2000, pages 36 - 39.
Holding Court 
World Architecture 86 (London), May 2000, pages 78 - 81.

Photo by Luis Ferreira Alves
Paula Rêgo Museum - Cascais, Portugal 2005-2009 
Courtesy of The Pritzker Architecture Prize

Beinahe Nichts With a Twist

Eduardo Souto de Moura
Burgo Tower, Porto

architektur.aktuell (Vienna), November 2008, pages 58 - 69

© 1998 David Cohn & architektur.aktuell
All rights reserved

While it might seem that little new could be wrung from the well-worn theme of the minimalist Miesian skyscraper, in his Burgo office tower in Portugal's northern city of Porto, Eduardo Souto de Moura gives the formula a surprising twist. Souto's design, intended as a prototype applicable to other sites, is so formally precise and perverse in its rhetorical expression of the structural cage that we could call it Mannerist. He uses the Miesian formal apparatus of applied facade columns and beams to create a precise though misleading visual reading of the construction, transforming the tower into a masked, reticent prism.

The building is sited in a prime area of new development on the Avenida da Boavista, which stretches from the center of the city to the ocean. The project was designed in 1998, but construction did not begin until 2004, and the building opened early this year. Souto de Moura was thus confronted with a context still in the making, in an area where the continuous street wall of the city around Rem Koolhaas' Casa da Música Concert hall, located a few blocks to the east, breaks down into isolated towers amid the verdant hills above the Douro River.

The uncertain site conditions may help explain the powerful way in which Souto's project marks its territory and defines its autonomy from its surroundings – although these traits are common to most of his buildings, as exemplified by his court houses, which address the street like well-finished shipping containers (see The Court House Revisited). The 17-story tower, 70 meters high, is set on a platform over two levels of parking. Souto deploys a low building containing offices and ground-floor retail space to screen the eastern, developed side of the plaza. The tower stands back from the avenue to establish a distant, Miesian formality of address between them, with the side-effect, surely intentional, of hiding the building behind existing and future constructions. It is further protected at street level by a colorful, monumental plaza sculpture by artist Angelo de Sousa.

The design task was complicated by the fact that the tower faces Boavista from the south, meaning that its main facade is in shadow most of the day. This helps justify the radical differentiation of the tower's facades –another characteristic of Souto's work– which gives rise to its perverse transformation of Miesian form. The north and south facades are of glass, deeply set for shading within a structural cage of granite-finished columns and false aluminum beams (composed with thick plates of projecting flanges), while the east and west facades are largely finished in granite panels to block low eastern and western sunlight, with slots of horizontal glass that are positioned at the same level as the horizontal "beams" of the glass facades. These aluminum elements are deployed three to a floor, masking the scale of the tower.

The granite-faced columns on the glass facades can be misleadingly read in visual terms as the ends of continuous granite walls, like the east and west facades, traversing the volume from north to south, while the thin glazed voids of the east and west facades are interrupted by short aluminum beams covering the columns, as if these too traversed the building from east to west. The effect in three dimensions is as if the building were built like a house of cards, a stack of north-south granite walls separated by east-west aluminum beams. Taking this vision a step further, the building can be read as a variation on Souto's "shipping container" rowhouses with their glazed garden ends and solid side walls, but here stacked vertically like true containers.

Entry to the tower is oblique and secretive rather than frontal: on the western elevation, a section of the granite wall hinges open to reveal the entry door within (most visitors enter in any case from the garage). The hierarchy of the facades also reflects the interior distribution, with the office spaces oriented to the north and south, in two sections of approximately 300 m² each – the building has a total of 12.000 m² of rentable space.  The model floor features office furniture that Souto designed for the project, and that will be produced by the Portuguese firm Julcar Mobiliário Integrado. Desks, tables and storage units defining work areas are made of fiberboard panels with veneers of matte-finished aluminum. Together with the discrete seating and suspended ceiling uplights for indirect lighting, fabricated by Osvaldo Matos, the furniture is straightforward and contemporary, like the desks and boxes of Donald Judd.

Geometric precision is another of Souto's obsessions, as in the affinity he establishes between the square structural bay of the facades (3.5 x 3.5 m), divided horizontally into thirds, with the plan of the tower's typical floors, another square divided into thirds by the two areas of offices and the technical core. Other squares are found in the plans of the plaza, the two elevator cores, the area rugs of the lobby seating, etc.

In the low horizontal building Souto plays another curious formal game, using closely-set vertical mullions to transform it into a "continuous horizontal band" in his words, and detailing the end walls like section cuts, with protruding elements of unframed glass, granite "floor slabs" and aluminum carpentry, as if he had cut the structure from an infinite ribbon  – a transposition of the conceptual, vertical infinity of the tower in the horizontal dimension.

While Álvaro Siza's local buildings portray him as the gentlemanly master of effects of reflected light and playful spatial distortion, Souto de Moura reaffirms himself with this tower as a reclusive perfectionist, establishing an island of absolute, calming order amid the unplanned chaos, the disordered, overgrown garden of Porto's urbanized suburbs.

Photoa by DC

The Court House Revisited

Court houses, Porto, Portugal, by Eduardo Souto de Moura
© David Cohn, Bauwelt, 2000. All rights reserved.

The site of Eduardo Souto de Moura's latest work, a luxury housing development in Porto, Portugal, is a typical example of the disconcerting juxtapositions and hidden surprises of the landscape around the city, the product of haphazard and seemingly zoneless growth.  The site was originally a vegetable plot on the grounds of "an aristocratic villa with a beautiful garden," in Souto's words, which overlooked a quiet estuary of the Atlantic Ocean near the beach resort of Matosinhos.  The estuary was later transformed into the busy freight port of Leixôes, replacing the silted river docks of the Douro in the center of the city, and Matosinhos has become a dense and growing bedroom suburb.  The old mansion and its gardens recently found new use as a setting for wedding receptions and the like, while its vegetable garden was sold for development.  The land has been divided into nine rowhouse lots on a trapezoidal parcel, and an odd triangular lot for which Souto has designed a larger and more singular house.  The houses occupy a raised and graded terrace, which is screened from the port by dense unkept undergrowth, and isolated from the villa and gardens behind it by old stone walls and a second rise in level.

One of the principal aims of the project, according to Souto, was to change the character of the site as little as possible, creating a setting in which "vegetation will grow up between the walls to merge with the neighboring gardens and fields."   This conservative impulse, however, has given rise to a radical design, in which the nine houses are completely sealed off from the outside by high windowless concrete walls.  Each house opens exclusively to a series of private courtyards that are concealed behind the walls.  From the exterior, with its discrete entries, the pairs of sliding metal garage doors that rise the full height of the walls, and the continuous metal cornice, the complex appears to be a high-security industrial facility rather than a privileged residential enclave. 

There may be real concerns for security at the site, given its proximity to the port and its isolation.  The industrial exterior camouflages the buildings among the nearby warehouses and factories.  But there also seems to be a deliberate intent to shock in the uncompromising harshness of the exterior, an urge to see just how far the Modernist dictates of reason can be carried against our unconscious aesthetic preconceptions about domesticity.  After all, Souto might ask us, what really distinguishes this development from an industrial facility?  – not the rational division of the site into parcels, not the search for economy and efficiency in the construction, and not the promoter's search for profit.  Only the interior content is different: a series of domestically-scaled spaces and gardens rather than a high open warehouse.  But at the same time, the glimpse that we may catch, behind one of the mute metal entry doors, of a small entry court with its plants and welcoming portico, provokes in us an irresistible curiosity.  Souto has reduced domesticity to its essential condition, to a mysterious interiority in primary relation to nature.

Each unit unfolds around three courtyards: the entry court, a central light court for the three bedrooms and interior spaces, and a large rear garden, opening from the living area and kitchen through sheer glass walls, and featuring in larger lots a swimming pool and bathhouse.  Just as the entry court attracts us, the rear garden also acts as a lure, drawing the visitor through the house and casting its interior spaces into dynamic flow, an effect similar to that found in the compressed indoor-outdoor spaces of a walled Chinese garden.

The bedroom circulation hall and a bathroom are naturally lit by small skylights, contributing to the sensation that the houses are nearly underground, and that the main openings to the exterior are horizontal, to the sky, rather than vertical windows.  Souto underlines this impression when he describes the construction as "three horizontal strips of concrete, which act as roofs, supported by the party walls," a concept clearly legible in the roof plan and in overhead views.  In this respect, the houses are simply the spaces created by overlapping two levels of the garden's terraced terrain.

The houses are designed of course in open homage to Mies van der Rohe's unrealized Court House projects of the 1930s.  This is evident not only in the interpenetration of interior and exterior spaces within common walls -- the interiors also suggest a Miesian free space in the circulation pattern and the articulation of a few key walls and windows as floating vertical planes.  Moreover, Souto takes as his own a Miesian minimalism and respect for the detail, seen in this project in the carefully studied encounters between elements, and the fine finishes, custom cabinetwork and other luxurious appointments, including the carefully-tended full-grown plantings in the exterior courts.  This open invocation of Mies characterizes all of Souto's work, although in many previous projects he has given the Miesian vocabulary a rugged local character through the use of solid walls of native stone, as in his 1990 Casa des Artes cultural center in Oporto, and several of his famous residential designs. 

Certain personal reasons could account for this approach.  In his advocacy of the expensive detail over the grand gesture, and his wish to leave the site undisturbed, Souto seems to be disguising or displacing his creative ambitions, an unusual trait for a talented architect.  It should also be noted that Souto, now 47, is a close friend and colleague of his mentor, Álvaro Siza.  His refuge in Mies and the Miesian detail could well be part of an intent to escape Siza's powerful influence, in a curious variation on literary critic Harold Bloom's theory of "The Anxiety of Influence" between master poets and their disciples.

But at the same time, Souto actually situates himself quite far from Mies' lofty search for perfection.  He once told an interviewer, "Architecture is very limited. Buildings are rarely the product of an architect's ideas; they are the result of legislation.  There are rules for dimensions, for layout, for building systems, and, with exceptions such as cathedrals and museums, the idea of the space ends up corseted.  For this reason I concentrate on the details, to try to move one emotionally without failing to meet the norms."  This severe curtailment of the scope of architecture places Souto in a more contemporary position.  The totalizing revolutionary premises of Mies and the other figures of the early Modern Movement, the idea of the work of architecture as a prototype set in abstract space, yield here to a more realistic, modest, and defensive stand, in which the work of architecture must find a place for itself in the limited context of contemporary development.

In this sense, then, the understated character of Souto's intervention can perhaps be best understood in relation to Porto's special character.  In the disparate juxtapositions of its ex-urban sprawl, its mixture of old villas, small industries, abandoned vegetable plots and new development, all brought together, softened and harmonized by the overgrown local vegetation, Porto could be said to resemble a grand but neglected garden.  In this landscape, Souto's buildings seek to nestle invisibly into an overlooked corner, to bring housekeeping, harmony, and a sense of mystery and light to the modest bit of the grounds in their charge.  This image, of the untidy garden as a humanizing ideal, which is also close to the heart of Siza's Porto work, is one of the most interesting responses architecture has yet to offer to the challenging landscape of unbridled urban growth.

Originally published as:
Hofhäuser in Hafenmähe
Bauwelt 33, September 1, 2000, pages 36 - 39.
Holding Court
World Architecture 86 (London), May 2000, pages 78 - 81.

Different Voices

Pousada de Santa María do Bouro 
by Eduardo Souto de Moura

© David Cohn, Architectural Record, Bauwelt.
All rights reserved.

The Pousadas or Inns of Portugal, a chain of state-owned luxury hotels, are one country's answer to an enviable but difficult problem: what to do with a surplus of obsolete medieval castles, Renaissance palaces, Baroque monasteries and the like. Twenty-two pousadas in adapted historic settings (as well as 21 more in entirely modern structures) are scattered across the country, often in remote rural settings and national parks. Small, usually with fewer than 30 rooms, they serve tourists making the rounds of Portugal's historic sites, as well as hosting wedding banquets, small business retreats and other events. While not highly profitable in themselves, they form a prestigious support network for culturally-based tourism, and help maintain a priceless architectural patrimony.

The Pousada of Santa María do Bouro, the latest addition to the chain, occupies an imposing 18th century Cistercian monastery in the tiny rural village of Bouro -- a handful of houses above the lush banks of the Cavado River. Originally founded in 1162, the monastery was rebuilt several times; the present structure dates to the 18th century, and is attached to a church that is still in use. Today, the Pousada serves visitors to the ancient northern city of Braga, ten miles to the west, a religious center famed for its historic churches and Easter Week processions.

The hotel's 33 rooms are arranged around two open spaces: a U-shaped court planted with orange trees, and the cloister one level above, restored as a free-standing circuit of arcaded walls. Guests sleep in the austere modern equivalents of the monks' cells, and dine in the former kitchens, where the pyramidal brick chimney of the ovens has been transformed into a monumental skylight. A new service wing for the laundry, kitchen and mechanical plant has been built against the lower flanks of the southern facade, its roof acting as a terrace to the public rooms off the cloister. A tennis court and small oval swimming pool can be found on the semi-wild grounds, with their ancient paths and stone walls.

When architect Eduardo Souto de Moura began work in 1989, the monastery was an overgrown ruin beside its intact church. Its decline had begun in 1834, when the state seized and auctioned church properties, and little remained but its crumbling walls, without roofs or floors. Souto (Porto, 1952) won the commission largely for his experience in traditional stonework. A student and frequent collaborator of Álvaro Siza, he has designed several private houses incorporating new and rehabilitated stone walls. Souto labored for three years with skilled masons on the ruin, consolidating the walls and rebuilding large parts of the upper floor, the cloister and the dining room.

Souto chose not to attempt a literal restoration of the monastery to its original 18th century state. Rather, he took the ruin as his starting point, and decided simply to make it habitable, using the modern means at his disposal but with all due respect for the remains. He sees this approach as consistent with the development of the monastery over eight centuries. "The natural evolution of historic buildings has always been to serve new functions, to be manipulated and transformed without any moral implications," he maintains. "What charms us about the historic city is this layering of different voices."

For the reconstruction, Souto introduced a series of minimal, carefully-detailed elements. To stabilize the walls laterally, the lost wood beams and joists were replaced by an exposed corten steel deck of his own design. A frame of horizontally-laid I beams is topped with steel plate and concrete and anchored to the walls, with raised wide-plank wood flooring above. The missing pitched roofs were replaced with flat decks covered with insulating earth and seeded with ground cover. Souto also designed the yellow brass window frames, which are virtually invisible from the exterior. They are set on the inside of openings, without sills, so as not to interrupt the stone, draining via an internal channel and a weep to the outside.

Souto initially planned to distinguish new masonry from existing, but during construction he abandoned what he calls "this Manichean idea" and began to "dissemble the new on the old, which is dominant." He used traditional sand and lime mortar, and recovered fallen blocks of stone on the site in order to match the color and texture of existing walls: the well-trimmed blocks of the main floor with its Baroque window openings, and the more irregular stone on the upper floor, with corners and windows neatly framed. The new service wing is dressed in a more rustic grain of large irregular blocks and more open joints. It is thus clearly legible both as a modern element and as a semi-buried podium, closer to the rough stonework of retaining walls and country fields than to the fine masonry of the monastery.

In the interiors, the missing floors made the introduction of elevators, piping and other services relatively easy. Souto had more problems with the air conditioning, "obligatory for a five-star hotel but against the nature of a centuries-old building" in his opinion. Large ducts under the main floor deliver air via discrete perimeter grills. In the guest rooms, air units supplied with chilled or hot water from the roof are hidden above the bathrooms, which read as free-standing cabinets. The minibars, another difficult requirement in the small guest rooms, are recessed in cavities chiseled out of the thick stone exterior walls.

Souto's intention in these details is to make the resolution of the design problem seem natural and effortless. In fact, the reconstruction is full of invisible extravagances -- an original monumental stone stair in the west wing, disassembled and moved a pair of meters to comply with fire-safety codes; or an air duct big enough to stride through at full height, which is buried under the orange trees of the U-shaped court. Low labor costs and surviving craft traditions permitted a quality of materials, finishes and workmanship that would be difficult to match elsewhere, although Souto attributes this difference to questions of "tradition and culture" more than expense.

This severe monastic retreat seems to rise from its site like a prehistoric monument, a man-made artifact almost lost to nature. Souto's reconstruction is full of echoes of its former abandon: the flat roofs overhung with bits of vegetation, the roofless cloister, the dark window openings, some with their sky-blue blackout shades drawn as if bits of sky could still be seen through the structure. It comes as something of a surprise to find a brightly colored beach towel hung out to dry in one of the windows, or to watch a pair of children scampering down a cold stone staircase to the pool -- signs of a magnificent ruin come to life.


Different versions of this article appeared in:
Architectural Record, November 1998, pages 120 - 123.
Bauwelt 4, January 22, 1999, pages 174 - 179.
World Architecture 73, February 1999, pages 78 - 79.

Photo © Luis Ferreira Alves